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It was a misty morning in 1974, and four-year-old Gruff Rhys was being carried up the side of a mountain, perched on his dad’s shoulders. Once they’d reached a level where they could see the valley before them, his father put him down and pointed up to where the rocks hit the mist.

‘That, Gruff, is the peak of the mountain!’

Gruff nodded.

‘Unfortunately, my lad, the peak of the mountain is the most boring part. But! Take a look over there, at the dip between the rocks. Do you see?’

He pointed slightly further down, to where a pathway seemed to wind its way cryptically between the hills before disappearing round the corner.

‘Those are the passes – the gateways between the mountains!’

Gruff nodded.

‘It’s along those passes that you’ll find different peoples meeting and interacting with each other. Historically they are a link between cultures … a connection between the towns.’ He put his son back on his shoulders and set off again.

‘It’s not the peaks of the mountains that matter, lad,’ he announced. ‘It’s the gaps between them!’

Gruff’s family had recently moved to the slate-quarrying town of Bethesda from Cardiff. This had mainly been because Gruff’s dad had taken a job as county secretary in nearby Caernarfon, but Bethesda also appealed because it was a Welsh-speaking area.

‘My grandfather had lost the Welsh language by one generation,’ says Gruff today, ‘so my father spoke English with him and Welsh with his mother – and could never imagine speaking to either of them in any other language.’

By contrast, both Gruff’s parents spoke to him, his brother and his sister in Welsh: the family was going back to its roots.

Gruff’s father, Ioan Bowen Rees, had two main passions: he was a committed public servant, and he loved the Welsh mountains. The two themes came together in the books that he wrote, in which the freedom of the mountains provided a convenient metaphor for his political philosophy. Ioan was widely regarded as a fair man who could rise above petty political games, a left-wing internationalist who disregarded the obsessive self-worship of his country as insularism. His politics were forged during an era of social tension and cold war propaganda, and he shared his thoughts openly, telling one interviewer that ‘the battle for Wales is the battle for all small nations, all small communities, all individuals in the age of genocide’.

Gruff’s mother, Margaret, ran the local Welsh-language playgroup. She was also a teacher who shared her husband’s love of writing, and had composed a book of poems. According to Gruff, ‘She did one book, a book of sonnets. If I remember correctly most sonnets have fourteen lines, but she specialised in thirteen-line sonnets.’

At home, the music on the stereo was a curious mixture. Ioan was a record collector who despised pop, instead preferring the ‘proper music’ of composers such as Wagner, who’d be blasted from the speakers at full volume. And yet, strangely enough, reggae was deemed acceptable, as was Welsh-language pop. National radio stations such as Radio One were cut off by the mountains surrounding Bethesda, but Gruff and his siblings found other ways of discovering international pop music: the frequencies of Irish stations would occasionally travel across the sea, transmitting the disco hits of the 1970s alongside the occasional Celtic fiddle ballad.

At the age of six, Gruff learned that Planet Earth was about to come to an abrupt end. One day, he and his cousin returned home from messing about in the fields to discover a book that Gruff’s brother had left lying about. ‘TIME AND THE GALAXY’, boomed the title. Flicking through the pages, their curiosity turned to morbid horror as they came across an illustration of the sun crashing into Earth, melting human civilisation into a pool of lava in the process. Underneath was a simple caption: ‘The fate of the sun.’ Understandably, the kids were devastated.

‘At this time we hadn’t even realised that our parents were going to die,’ says Gruff, ‘so we were completely terrified at the thought of this massive event. Unfortunately we didn’t read the book any further, so we were oblivious to the fact that it wouldn’t happen for a really long time.’

FURRY FILE: GRUFF

BORN – Hwlffordd, 1970 (‘In the hospital’)

CHILDHOOD SUPERPOWER – Hallucination

CHILDHOOD SUPERWEAKNESS – Pasties

CHILDHOOD DISASTER – ‘I had a ticket to see Gary Moore and Phil Lynott at the Manchester Apollo, when I was thirteen. And my parents decided I shouldn’t go to Manchester on my own at thirteen to watch a heavy metal band … and then Phil Lynott died a few weeks after. That was a bit of a scar’

CHILDHOOD VICTORY – Discovering music (‘It was a defining change of pace’)

BAD BEHAVIOUR – Covering school books with cartoons. ‘I got a detention, then didn’t turn up to that, then I got detained for a whole term … based on a cartoon’

TEEN REBEL ICON – Lou Reed

TEEN GROOMING TIP – Not grooming

GEEKY PASSION – The Velvet Underground (‘From the age of thirteen that was my specialist Mastermind subject’)

FIRST SONGWRITING ATTEMPT – ‘Rydwi’n Mynd Yn Hén’ (‘It was about getting old … I was five’)

BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Feel Flows’

Rock and roll education came early. Gruff’s older brother Dafydd formed a band called Chwd Poeth, meaning ‘Hot Puke’, who were barred from performing at school after they’d apparently vomited on the audience at their first show. Inspired by such cavalier behaviour, Gruff began collecting plastic buckets to play the drums on, eventually finding one that sounded uncannily like a bass drum. Unfortunately the drummer from Chwd Poeth agreed, and stole it to use on stage himself.

One October morning, Gruff’s school announced that the world’s first Welsh-language horror film would be projected in the sports barn. Gwaed Ar Y Sêr (‘Blood on the Stars’) was about a group of choirboys who invited celebrities to their church then gruesomely slaughtered them. The nine-year-old kids screamed with delight at its gory scenes, although Gruff found himself more interested in the short film they screened afterwards to calm everyone down. It was a concert documentary about a popular 1970s Welsh group, called Edward H. Dafis. They were performing a grand farewell show – their last before breaking up for ever.

Gruff stared up at the flickering Super-8 images, and slowly grew more and more mesmerised by the peaceful acoustic meditations of the band. When the spool eventually ran out, he looked up and asked a teacher: ‘Which of the music players was Edward H. Dafis, miss?’

‘Ah, Gruff,’ smiled the teacher. ‘I don’t think any of them are called that. That’s just the name of the band!’

Impressed, Gruff decided that Edward H. Dafis were his favourite new band. However, this was to be short lived: the week after, they were replaced by another folk-rock group, Ac Eraill. ‘They were like a boy band, but a folk boy band with long hair,’ says Gruff today, describing them. The following week he discovered another band to add to his list of Great New Bands – and when he couldn’t find another the week after, it was clearly time to form one himself.

That Saturday, Gruff’s mum drove him to the youth club. A local teacher had come up with the idea of training kids to play rock, encouraging local groups to donate their old instruments in a co-operative scheme. The strategy was, at least in part, successful.

‘We’ve got five drum kits and, er … well, we’ve got five drum kits,’ said the man behind reception. ‘Shall I put you down for drum lessons?’

After a few hours of bashing out crude rhythms, Gruff noticed another kid being dropped off outside. During the lunch break, Gruff would discover that his name was Daf, and that – coincidentally – he was also there for drum lessons.

‘My dad took me to the club,’ says Daf today. ‘I didn’t want to go because I was super shy at the time, so he forced me. On that first day Gruff and me started learning to play drums together. We were both twelve and lived about forty miles apart from each other.’ Despite the distance, Gruff and Daf got on well enough to make a Goonies-style pact: they agreed that, should one of them ever need the other to play drums, they would be there.

In summer 1983, Gruff’s brother attended a pirate radio conference in Birmingham. Upon returning home to Bethesda, his parents opened the door to find him armed to the teeth with illegal contraptions which, he said, would facilitate the pirate radio takeover of North Wales.

Within twenty-four hours, he’d recruited Gruff to the cause. Suddenly a strange combination of guitar-based jingles and Python-style sketches were being broadcast from the peaks of the mountains. This was, in fact, literally the case: the mountaintops provided the best signal for the transmitter, so Dafydd would scale them by night and hide the device among the rocks, sourcing the frequency so that they could operate from home.

There followed two weeks of successful broadcasting, until one night Dafydd burst through the door of his brother’s room with a mildly disconcerting smile. ‘We’re on telly,’ he panted.

The two of them jumped downstairs to catch the evening news, with Dafydd leaning so close the light flickered on his face.

‘Tonight the police are engaged in a manhunt for the pirates of Bethesda: the illegal DJs who are transmitting on the exact same frequency used by the local police force … and causing mayhem.’

‘Awesome!’ Dafydd laughed. ‘We’ve been broadcasting on the police frequency!’

He switched off the lights and crawled over to the window. Down in the night below, two police cars were projecting their headlights up the steep curves of the opposite mountain. ‘They know the transmitter’s up there,’ whispered Dafydd.

The pirates’ days were numbered, but Bethesda’s underground radio scene was just getting started. Citizens band radio, or CB as it was commonly known, was a form of short-wave communication made famous by Hollywood movies during the 1970s. American truckers used CB to communicate in Smokey and the Bandit, while the cops in The Dukes of Hazzard used it to bark at each other while speeding through Kentucky. Now, for reasons that nobody could quite explain, the teenagers of Bethesda were using it to communicate between the valleys.

It was 1982.

‘Your basic CB system is quite crude,’ said the moustached man at the car boot sale, holding up two pieces of scrap metal to an audience of bewitched children. ‘You just slot this bit into here … then plug this wire in here … then talk through this bit over here!’ He burped. ‘Excuse me, children. Now does anyone have any questions?’

‘My father says it is illegal!’ announced one kid.

‘Well,’ said the moustached man, leaning in with a glint in his teeth. ‘I guess your father just ain’t cool then, is he?’

Within weeks, CB was more popular than ET. As soon as night descended on the valleys, entire networks of teenagers began transmitting messages to one another, using codenames to protect their identities from the police. The police, meanwhile, would be stationed on the other end of town, listening in from their vans. As far as they could fathom, an underground criminal network had come to town; it would be some weeks before they realised it was just a bunch of kids.

Meanwhile, the codenames grew ever more mysterious: Gruff became known as ‘Goblin’, while the weediest kid in school renamed himself ‘The Black Stallion’. It was communication chaos – a kind of primitive social network – and the more it continued, the more an interesting side effect emerged: since all the coded language had been inspired by truckers in American movies, a weird hybrid language began to develop that was part Hollywood bandit-speak, part Welsh tongue.